Social media is abuzz with a “new” resident in Flathead Lake. Smallmouth bass, caught in the big lake. I haven’t caught them myself, and haven’t fished for them yet, but the photos are there, confirming rumors I’ve been hearing for the last few years about Flathead’s growing bass population.
It’s not a surprise. The Flathead River downstream of the lake is probably western Montana’s top smallmouth fishery. That the fish gained an “assist” around the dam — in these days of rampant bucket biology — was kind of expected. These “stockings” have probably been happening for years.
A comment under one smallmouth photo on Instagram summed up how I feel about this latest development in fish experimentation: “Just a crazy fishery in Flathead Lake. Not sure if we should be excited or disgusted.”
As the comment suggests, the news can be both good and bad. The good here is that smallies happen to be cool fish. The bad news is that the bass are just another predacious nonnative species, another mouth to feed, that will further complicate efforts to restore native fish such as bull and cutthroat trout.
That recovery is a highly contentious tightrope act for fisheries managers as is.
Smallmouth bass really aren’t bass, but like largemouth, are members of the sunfish family that includes other Montana nonnatives such as bluegill and crappie. These fish are more modern in evolutionary terms than trout, and smallmouth are hardy. This fueled the species’ expansion beyond its original range from the middle Mississippi north through the Great Lakes and into Canada and the Hudson Bay drainage. Since they traveled well in barrels, as the railroads reached across the continent to the West Coast, so did smallies.
Compared to largemouth, smallmouth prefer cooler, cleaner water. In bass country they’re considered a good indicator of water quality, but there are already bull trout in Flathead Lake, and bulls have that canary-in-a-coal-mine thing covered just fine.
By some accounts, smallies are considered one of the hardest fighting of all freshwater fish. They can be fooled by surface lures and flies, and once hooked are prone to leaping, which is always fun, for the angler at least.
I’ve only caught one smallmouth, at an obscure, windswept puddle named Tinemaha Reservoir. The reservoir, part of the Los Angeles Aqueduct system, is on the lower Owens River in California’s Eastern Sierra. We used to run up Highway 395 to fish for trout near Mammoth Lakes, but it was a long drive, so we liked to break up the trip with a stop or two. Tinemaha was about halfway, and we heard it held smallmouth.
Smallies are a rare thing in that part of the world. SoCal is largemouth heaven, and many folks think world-record fish lurk in the reservoirs that water Los Angeles. Bass grow to enormous size there by feasting on rainbow trout stocked in the winter.
Anyway, we stopped at the reservoir on one of our trips. I lobbed out a plastic worm and on my first cast, bam. It fought hard, though it wasn’t a terribly large smallmouth. I lipped him so I could remove the hook, got a look and the burning red eye staring me down, and sent the bass back into Tinemaha. We fished for another hour without a bite, and that was that.
I moved to Montana shortly after and haven’t fished for bass, smallies or otherwise since. That’s got nothing to do with bass, however, and everything to do with my preferred target: trout.
Still, I appreciate smallmouth. Smallies are a classic, wicker creel and tweed kind of fish that prefers habitat similar to trout. The bad is that smallies are nonnative, and big ones will eat baby trout. Big nonnative fish eating baby natives is already problem enough in the big lake.
A burgeoning population of smallmouth won’t make management any easier.